end of the century, were quite willing to
say that their several methods were not exclusive but were
complementary.

Toward the end of the last century a positivist sociological thinking
tended to supersede the metaphysical-historical and the
utilitarian-analytical. All phenomena were determined by inexorable
natural laws to be discovered by observation. Moral and social and
hence legal phenomena were governed by laws as completely beyond the
power of conscious human control as the movements of the planets. We
might discover these laws by observation of social phenomena and might
learn to submit to them intelligently instead of rashly or ignorantly
defying them. But we could hope to do no more. Except as he could
learn to plot some part of the inevitable curve of legal development
and save us from futile flyings in the face of the laws by which legal
evolution was inevitably governed, the jurist was powerless. Many
combined this mode of thought with or grafted it on the
metaphysical-historical theory and fought valiantly against the social
legislation of the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first
decade of the present century with this reinforced juristic pessimism
as a base. Superficially it appeared that the Greek idea of the
naturally just, which in its Roman form of natural law and its
eighteenth-century form of natural rights had made for a creative
legal science as long as such a science had existed, had at length
exhausted its possibilities.

Today, however, we hear of a revival of natural law. Philosophy of law
is raising its head throughout the world. We are asked to measure
rules and doctrines and institutions and to guide the application of
law by reference to the end of law and to think of them in terms of
social utility. We are invited to subsume questions of law and of the
application of law under the social ideal of the time and place. We
are called upon to formulate the jural postulates of the civilization
of the time and place and to measure law and the application of law
thereby in order that law may further civilization and that the legal
materials handed down with the civilization of the past may be made an
instrument of maintaining and furthering the civilization of the
present. We are told that observation shows us social interdependence
through similarity of interest and through division of labor as the
central fact in human existence and are told to measure law and the
applicatio